Bluestocking Oxford

By Ava Doherty

In The Pursuit of Love, fascism is concealed behind silk stockings and jokes about the help. Long dismissed as drawing-room fluff, Nancy Mitford’s fiction demands reappraisal as a sharply coded register of ideological anxiety. Beneath the charm lies a sophisticated inquiry into complicity, nostalgia, and the aristocracy’s uneasy flirtation with authoritarianism.

Mitford wrote from intimate knowledge of fascism’s social allure. Her own sister Diana had married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, in a ceremony attended by Hitler himself. Another sister, Unity, became infatuated with Nazi ideology and attempted suicide when Britain declared war on Germany. The Mitford family’s drawing rooms were thus literal sites where fascist sympathies mingled with upper-class sociability, lending Nancy’s fictional depictions their unsettling authenticity.

But what happens when satire flatters its subjects and readers just enough to escape moral ambiguity? Mitford’s work, at its core, performs a delicate balancing act between critique and seduction. Her prose simultaneously mocks aristocratic excess while rendering it irresistible through stylistic brilliance. Mitford’s style achieves this through crystalline precision married to devastating wit; she captures the rhythm of upper-class speech such that her characters become both ridiculous and magnetic. Her sentences dance between mockery and enchantment, employing what might be called a ‘glittering cruelty’ that complicates the reader in the very follies being exposed. “The Radletts were always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair”. This superlative emotional register becomes both the source of comedy and its seductive appeal.

The Pursuit of Love, Mitford’s 1945 novel, populates its world with eccentrics, nostalgists, and tragic romantics. At its centre stands Linda Radlett, the dreamy, love-obsessed daughter of a conservative aristocrat, Uncle Matthew, whose hatred for foreigners and modernity is presented as comic bluster rather than dangerous ideology. When Uncle Matthew hunts his children through the woods for sport, the reader is invited to laugh—but not to interrogate too deeply.

Furthermore, when Linda Radlett dreams of romantic fulfilment, she is not rebelling against aristocratic values but embodying their feminine ideal—a contradiction Mitford acknowledges but never fully resolves. Indeed, Linda’s romantic aspirations align perfectly with class expectations: “Linda had not the smallest intention of remaining single. She wished to be deeply in love, married, and surrounded by delightful children.” In this schema, love does not challenge aristocratic norms but fulfils them through feminine submission. Further, Linda’s pursuit becomes a kind of aristocratic performance, where the intensity of her romantic yearning validates the class’s claim to superior sensibility, even as it leads to her destruction.

The novel’s satirical edge cuts both ways. It ridicules aristocratic absurdities but preserves their allure. This double movement reflects Britain’s cultural mood during the 1930s and 40s: a longing for stability amidst ideological fracture. Rather than confronting fascism directly, Mitford’s novel cloaks critique in charm, enabling both irony and political ambivalence.

Nancy’s biography, however, complicates any simple reading of her work as pure satire. Her sisters Diana and Unity were fascists—Diana married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, while Unity cultivated an infamous infatuation with Hitler. On the other hand, Nancy reportedly informed both British intelligence and remained bound to their world by class, affection, and aesthetic sensibility. This familial split dramatises a broader ideological problem: how proximity to power complicates moral clarity. While Nancy explicitly rejected fascism, her fiction sentimentalises the very class structures that enabled its growth in Britain. The novel’s aristocrats, who are frequently racist, reactionary, and insulated, remain “good eggs,”; their politics is rendered harmless through comic exaggeration rather than serious examination.

When Linda falls for Christian Talbot, a committed Communist, Mitford describes her political engagement in striking aesthetic terms, suggesting she viewed political meetings as theatrical entertainment rather than serious ideology. “Linda was a plum ripe for shaking. The tree was now shaken, and down she came. Intelligent and energetic, but with no outlet for her energies […] she was in the mood either to take up some cause, or to embark upon a love affair.” This passage reveals how Mitford treats political conviction as aesthetic performance, a distancing technique that undermines ideological seriousness.

The politics of aesthetics, particularly feminine aesthetics, is also important in Mitford’s exploration of fascism. Red lipstick, famously banned under Hitler’s regime, symbolises rebellion and allure in British fiction. What Mitford captures is how femininity can simultaneously undermine and reinforce oppressive ideologies. The question is not whether women can be fascists (they certainly were) but how female complicity is framed as tragic, stylish, and even forgivable.

This framing creates ethical complications for the reader. When Linda’s cousin Fanny describes the Radlett family’s “beauty, fashion and high-spiritedness, on a background of enormous and entailed wealth”, we are positioned to admire rather than question this inheritance. The novel’s charm operates as ethical anaesthesia, dulling our critical faculties precisely where they should be most acute. The novel’s political ambiguity mirrors the broader cultural confusion of its era, when many British aristocrats found fascism’s emphasis on tradition and hierarchy quietly appealing, even as they publicly disavowed its cruder expressions.

Novelist Elizabeth Taylor (1912–1975) reveals a contemporary counterpoint to Mitford’s aristocratic satire. Taylor’s domestic fiction explores middle-class women’s interior lives with the psychological precision and moral clarity often absent from Mitford’s work. In novels like A Game of Hide and Seek (1951), Taylor eschews glamour for nuance and romance for ambivalence.

Taylor’s heroines are not deluded romantics or witty socialites but complex women navigating limited choices with quiet dignity. In A Game of Hide and Seek, her protagonist Harriet is described in terms that subvert conventional femininity: “With beautiful indifference, Harriet asked: ‘And when is he to go?’ She put her knife and fork neatly together and looked boldly and cruelly at her mother.” This moment occurs during a family dinner where Harriet learns that Vesey, the young man with whom she has been conducting an intense adolescent romance, is being sent away by his family to break up their attachment. Rather than dissolving into tears or pleading, the expected feminine response, Harriet receives this devastating news with an almost glacial composure that unsettles everyone present. Her “beautiful indifference” masks profound emotion while asserting her refusal to perform expected vulnerability. The precise domestic detail of arranging her cutlery becomes an act of rebellion, a small gesture of control in a moment when her emotional world is being dismantled by adult authority.

This description immediately contrasts with the feminine ideals that Mitford’s heroines embody and gently mock. Where Mitford’s characters exist in emotional extremes, peaks of ecstasy or valleys of despair, Taylor’s Harriet demonstrates a more subversive form of resistance through emotional restraint that borders on the ruthless.

Where Mitford dazzles with wit, Taylor illuminates through understatement. This stylistic difference reflects deeper political distinctions: Mitford offers aristocratic charm as partial compensation for moral ambiguity; Taylor provides middle-class restraint as a form of quiet resistance. Both write from within their class positions, but Taylor’s gaze is ultimately more critical of existing power structures.

The modern reader must therefore approach Mitford’s writing with both appreciation and scepticism. Her wit captivates while her politics trouble; her charm delights even as it distracts. This tension makes works like The Pursuit of Love not less valuable but more revealing of how cultural attitudes toward fascism were mediated through literature, femininity, and class. Mitford’s elegant ambiguities offer a warning and uncomfortable recognition in an era when authoritarianism once again drapes itself in alluring garments.

References

Hastings, S. (1985). Nancy Mitford: A Biography. Grafton.

Light, A. (1991). Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. Routledge.

Mitford, N. (2000). The Pursuit of Love. Penguin Modern Classics. (Original work published 1945)

Taylor, E. (1951). A Game of Hide and Seek.

Thompson, L. (2015). The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters. Head of Zeus.